From the Magazine

Why the Alt-Left Is a Problem, Too

Much of the media spotlight has been on the “alt-right.” But the “alt-left” provides a mirror image distortion: the same loathing of Clinton, rejection of “identity politics,” and itch for a reckoning.

Internet clickbait promotes mental tooth decay, squirting synthetic
controversy out of a can of Reddi-wip, but an article by Eileen Jones on January 9 went out of its way to swirl it on extra thick. Headlined
AGAINST MERYL STREEP, the indictment declared, “Meryl Streep’s
speechifying at the Golden Globes was the worst thing to happen since
Trump’s election.” Hoo-kay. If Donald Trump speaks Jerkish, according
to retired novelist Philip Roth, Jones’s broadside was written in
Snarkish: “That I should live to see the day when Meryl Streep’s
speechifying at a Hollywood awards show is admired as solemnly and
discussed as fervently as Lincoln’s second inaugural address is a
personal nightmare. Lectured by Streep! And about how her and all her
Hollywood pals, decked out in everything that costs the earth and
sparkles in the spotlight, are among the true victims of Donald Trump’s
American authoritarianism!” Streep’s chastising of Trump in her
acceptance speech at the Golden Globes was derided as a sniffy display
of royal hauteur, as if her ladyship had gotten her blue sash in a
twist. “The way she condemned the ‘performance’ of Donald Trump when he
mocked disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, as if Trump
were up for a rival Golden Globes Award and had disgraced the Screen
Actors Guild, was truly righteous, wasn’t it? She’s so classy, isn’t
she?”

Such derision of liberal Hollywood pieties—Jones ripped Streep for
being the sweetheart of Hillary Clinton’s “faux-feminist ‘pantsuit
nation’ ”—is familiar gargle from right-wing hucksters such as radio
host Laura Ingraham, the author of Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from
Hollywood, Politics, and the Media Are Subverting America. But here’s
the twist: Eileen Jones is no righty coveting a rotation spot in the Fox
News greenroom. She teaches film at Berkeley—and you know what it’s
like at Berkeley, radical fervor springing from every hair
follicle—and her Streep denunciation was published in Jacobin, which
bills itself as “a leading voice of the American left, offering
socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.”
Disillusionment with Obama’s presidency, loathing of Hillary Clinton,
disgust with “identity politics,” and a craving for a climactic
reckoning that will clear the stage for a bold tomorrow have created a
kinship between the “alt-right” and an alt-left. They’re not kissin’
cousins, but they caterwaul some of the same tunes in different keys.

The alt-right receives the meatiest share of attention in the media, as
it should. It’s powerful, vicious, steeped in neo-Nazi ideology,
nativist white supremacy, men’s-rights misogyny, and Ayn Rand capitalist
übermensch mythos, and it heralds a conquering hero in the White House
in President Donald J. Trump, while the former executive chairman of the
venereally right-wing Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, functions as despot
whisperer, trickling Iago-ish poison into Trump’s receptive skull. The
alt-left can’t match that for strength, malignancy, or tentacled reach,
but its dude-bros and “purity progressives” exert a powerful
reality-distortion field online and foster factionalism on the lib-left.
Its outlets include not only Jacobin but also the Intercept, one of
whose co-founders is the inexhaustible Glenn Greenwald, lawyer, author,
journalist, and crucial conduit for Edward Snowden’s stolen N.S.A. data
to The Guardian; Web sites such as Truthdig, Consortiumnews, and Naked
Capitalism; and anomalous apostates such as Mickey Kaus, a former
contributor to liberal percolators of ideas and opinions such as
Washington Monthly, the New Republic, Harper’s, and Slate, who migrated
sideways and down to the right-wing Daily Caller, did a temporary hitch
as a columnist for the Breitbart bughouse in 2016, and serves as a
tweeting defender of Trump’s proposed wall. Other busy beavers on
Twitter include Michael Tracey, Freddie deBoer, Mark Ames, Connor
Kilpatrick (a Jacobin contributor), Jeremy Scahill (journalist and
Intercept co-founder), and similar fun guys. A Tumblr site devoted to
“Trumpian Leftism” captures the intellectual flavor of their
temperaments. One of the alt-left’s political darlings is Tulsi Gabbard,
a progressive congresswoman from Hawaii who met with then
president-elect Donald Trump in Trump Tower and was rumored to be under
consideration for a Cabinet position, and its quixotic preacher-man and
noble leper is Cornel West, once an orator at every social-justice
convocation who got so uncoiled by his rancorous contempt for Obama and
cast adrift into the hazy fringes of the alt-left—see Michael Eric
Dyson’s definitive autopsy, “The Ghost of Cornel West,” the New
Republic, April 19, 2015—that in 2016 he supported the Green Party
candidacy of Jill Stein, that stellar mind.

VIDEO: Steve Bannon, the Shadow President

It was Jill Stein who said Hillary might be the greater evil in a Trump
matchup (“Hil­la­ry has the potential to do a whole lot more damage,
get us into more wars”), a sentiment shared by actress Susan Sarandon,
who told an interviewer she believed that Clinton was “more dangerous”
than Trump because she was more hawkish and better able to ram her
agenda through Congress. In words I suspect Sarandon wishes she could
reel back, she discounted the threat level posed by a Trump presidency:
“Seriously, I am not worried about a wall being built . . . . He is
not going to get rid of every Muslim in this country.” She speculated
on another occasion that a Trump win might hasten the revolution. The
left’s romance with revolution has always been a reality-blinder, this
thermodynamic belief that things need to get bad beyond the breaking
point so that people will take the vape pens out of their mouths, rise
up, and storm the Bastille. But the history of non-democracies and
authoritarian personality cults shows that things can stay bad and get
worse for a long time, leaving unhealable wounds. Mao’s China, for
example. Putin’s tubercular Russia.

There’s a confluence between the alt-right and the alt-left regarding
Vladimir Putin and the ratfucking (to use a venerable Watergate-era
term) performed by Russian hackers, trolls, and bots. The Tyler Durden
Fight Club alt-right idolizes Putin as a bare-chested manly man, as
opposed to a metrosexual like Obama and an emasculating harpy like
Hillary. This isn’t a beefcake fetish the alt-left shares. Instead, it
invokes McCarthyism and the specter of a new Red Scare to characterize
rising alarm over the Russian cyber-warfare as a rehash of Cold War
bogeyman tales. In a widely noticed Facebook post, director Oliver Stone
(whose most recent film was a soft-focus portrait of Edward Snowden)
reminisced, “I remember well in the 1950s when the Russians were
supposed to be in our schools, Congress, State Department—and
according to many Eisenhower/Nixon supporters—about to take over our
country without serious opposition (and they call me paranoid!).” Stone
ascribes the hysteria over the Russian hijacking of the democratic
process to mainstream-media mau-mauing. “As much as I may disagree with
Donald Trump (and I do) he’s right now target number one of the MSM
propaganda—until, that is, he jumps to the anti-Kremlin track because
of some kind of false intelligence or misunderstanding cooked up by CIA.
Then I fear, in his hot-headed way, he starts fighting with the
Russians, and it wouldn’t be long then until a state of war against
Russia is declared.”

THERE’S A CONFLUENCE BETWEEN ALT-RIGHT AND ALT-LEFT REGARDING VLADIMIR
PUTIN.

Wouldn’t worry about that. Too much sky-high, mile-wide evidence has
piled up since Stone’s post about the human-centipede collusion of
Trump’s family and some of his advisers (the resignation of Michael
Flynn notwithstanding) and Cabinet picks with Russian business interests
and Putin cronies to make such a Dr. Strangelove scenario plausible.
Former Democratic presidential candidate and maverick liberal Dennis
Kucinich, who sent Trump a congratulatory tweet after his inauguration,
shares Stone’s fear that Russophobia is being whipped up to further foul
plans afoot not in the Kremlin but at Langley and Foggy Bottom:
“#WakeUpAmerica, enough of the BS re #Russia stealing election =CIA
& State Dept propaganda to legitimize hostilities,” he tweeted on
December 10. And here is where the alt-right and the alt-left press
foreheads for a Vulcan mind-meld: the belief that the real enemy, the
true Evil Empire, isn’t Putin’s Russia but the Deep State, the
C.I.A./F.B.I./N.S.A. alphabet-soup national-security matrix. But if the
Deep State can rid us of the blighted presidency of Donald Trump, all I
can say is “Go, State, go.”